The lesbian and gay left has declared war against the growing
numbers of moderates, libertarians, and out-and-proud conservatives
(along with other ideological deviants) within the gay movement.
Gays committed to fighting for equality in all spheres of life but
who aren't part of the gay-left and lesbian-feminist coteries that
have heretofore dominated organized "lesbigay" politics
increasingly find themselves targeted and scapegoated.

Spearheading this campaign (or at least its latest round) has
been a chorus of recent articles by Tony Kushner, Richard
Goldstein, Sara Miles, and Urvashi Vaid, all taking aim at gay
"assimilationists" for (in Miles' words) aiding the "backlash
against feminism, multiculturalism, and affirmative action."

Here's a look at these attacks and what I believe lies behind
them.

The Left Strikes Back
In December 1993, Pulitzer Prize-winner Tony Kushner told the
Advocate that, in his view, "the serious gains we've made
are gains made by people I would identify as progressive - by the
Left," but that he feared the gay movement might abandon its
commitment to a broad, left-wing agenda. When Newsweek
asked him to contribute a major article commemorating the 25th
anniversary of the Stonewall riots, Kushner used the opportunity to
attempt to further marginalize gays who are not on the political
left, thus giving a skewed portrait of who gay people are.

With the zeal of a true believer, Kushner wrote that "To be a
progressive person is to resist Balkanization, tribalism,
separatism." Unfortunately, for the last decade "progressives" have
been the ones advocating identity-group based "remedies" (i.e.,
quotas, set-asides and dual standards) that have exacerbated racial
tensions and fermented resentments between the genders, while
promoting the idea that individuals needn't take responsibility for
their own lives ("victims" being entitled, its seems, to perpetual
government largess).

Gay white men, of course, take their lumps for enjoying the
privileges of the white male patriarchy. "Will the hatred of women,
gay and straight, continue to find new and more violent forms of
expression," Kushner wrote, "and will gay men and women of color
remain doubly, or triply oppressed, while white gay men find
greater measures of acceptance, simply because they are white
men?"

What an old, tired refrain! The fact is in Los Angeles and other
urban areas gay men are more likely to be victims of hate crimes
than are African-Americans - or lesbians. According to a Klanwatch
researcher quoted in the late William Henry III's much more
balanced Stonewall retrospective in Time, "People now are
less likely to condemn someone for being black or Hispanic," while
anti-gay bigotry "has become more acceptable."

Kushner isn't alone, of course, in suggesting that sexism and
racism motivate gays - particularly gay white men - who don't
embrace the left's idea of a progressive agenda. A December 1993
New York Times op-ed by Donald Suggs of the Gay and
Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) and Mandy Carter of the
Human Rights Campaign Fund (HRCF) held gay white men responsible
for black homophobia. Suggs and Carter, both African-Americans,
began by asserting that "leaders of the gay and lesbian movement
have given highest priority to the interest of their most powerful
constituents - white men," which apparently alienated gays of color
from the gay rights movement, causing, in turn, black churches to
support the religious right (got that?).

The piece ended with the charge that "Anyone who tries to widen
the focus of gay activism is characterized in some gay publications
as a white-male basher or is accused of caving in to political
correctness."

This reference, I suspect, applies to me, since I criticized
GLAAD in the November 1993 issue of Christopher Street,
writing that "Support for greater inclusiveness in the gay and
lesbian movement has been twisted into something altogether
different - a rationale for bashing gay, white men."

One might, by the way, ask Suggs and Carter to explain just what
they considered to be the exclusively "gay white male" issues that
have dominated the gay movement: Sodomy law repeal? Domestic
partnership? Employment and housing discrimination? Gays in the
military? AIDS? None of which, of course, solely concern "gay white
men."

What I imagine they're really criticizing is the gay community's
failure to embrace what Kushner and others conceive of as a grand
alliance of the radical left. Kushner's Newsweek piece
lamented that the traditions of radical America are under siege,
without showing the slightest understanding why Americans have
grown fed up with megabuck government programs - paid for by
middle-class taxpayers - that produce little and often make things
worse for the supposed beneficiaries.

Time reported that according to its just-completed
poll, those Americans who described homosexuality as morally wrong
made up exactly the same proportion (53%) as in a poll taken in
1978 - "before a decade and a half of intense gay activism."
Despite this striking failure to change popular opinion, Kushner
would have gays renew their commitment to a sweeping left-wing
alliance. Down that path lies ruin, for the more that the fight for
gay equality is linked with the radical left, the less likely we'll
be to win the hearts and minds of a nation founded on belief in
individual liberty and personal responsibility.

But the politics Kushner only hinted at in Newsweek
became explicit in "Homosexual Liberation: A Socialism of the
Skin," the opus he penned for the July 4th issue of the
Nation. Freed from the need for euphemisms, Kushner's
Nation tract laid it on the line: "Homosexuals...like most
everyone else, are and will continue to be oppressed by the
depredations of capital until some better way of living together
can be arrived at." He quoted Oscar Wilde's essay "The Soul of Man
under Socialism," to the effect that "A map of the world that does
not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at."

At least it can be said of Wilde that he lived before the
monstrous dystopia of state socialism cast its shadow upon the
planet, depriving countless millions of life and liberty. Kushner
has no excuse.

To advance his call for ideological purity, Kushner took aim at
both New Republic editor Andrew Sullivan and author Bruce
(A
Place at the Table) Bawer - the gay left's best-loved
whipping boys. He disapprovingly quoted Sullivan's statement that
"Every right and responsibility that heterosexuals enjoy by virtue
of the state [should] be extended to those who grow up different.
And that is all."

Sullivan's thought crime was to argued that gays must demand
public equality but should not seek to legislate private tolerance.
Bawer, for his part, was castigated for writing that the movement
for gay equal rights should not be linked "with any left-wing cause
to which any gay leader might happen to have a personal
allegiance."

Kushner responded that "Like all assimilationists, Andrew and
Bruce are unwilling to admit that structural or even particularly
formidable barriers exist between themselves and their straight
oppressors...nowhere do they express a concern that people of color
or the working class or the poor are not being communed with."

He added, "Such a politics of homosexuality is dispiriting. Like
conservative thought in general, if offers very little in the way
of hope, and very little in the way of vision. I expect both hope
and vision from my politics."

Well I do, too. And, I have no doubt, so do Sullivan and Bawer.
But it is not the false dream of the gay left, promising "utopia"
through a socially re-engineered humankind, with its reeducation
camps (or sensitivity retreats) and distribution of perks and
political position according to race and gender categories (class
having all but been abandoned, after white working folks proved
notoriously unreceptive to the left's appeals).

Spare us, Lord, from artists and academics who dream of utopia.
I'll opt for equality before the law any day, and take
responsibility for making my own garden grow.

Outrageous
Also spare us from leftist lesbigay journalists offering up
revelatory articles on gay centrists/conservatives. A case in point
was Sara Miles "Do the Right Thing" in the July/Aug. 1994 issue of
Out magazine. Ms. Miles explains it all to you, entering
enemy territory to interview Kushner's bete noires, Bruce Bawer and
Andrew Sullivan, along with original cold-warrior Marvin Liebman,
Log Cabinboy Rich Tafel, and a host of others.

To be fair, Miles allowed these activists to speak for
themselves at some length. On the other hand, she submerged their
remarks into a text that is relentlessly patronizing. "These men's
criticisms of existing gay politics and subculture are rooted in
the same backlash against feminism, multiculturalism, and
affirmative action that fuels the broader neoconservative
movement," she huffed. Gee, I guess they've failed to see
the light. What's more, she continues, "Adding a couple of token,
respectable lesbians or a black face to the letterhead [of
conservative gay groups] won't change the essential nature of an
argument that pits 'good' gays against 'bad' queers, and that
sneers about 'political correctness' when challenged for its
elitism."

Actually, the "backlash" charge is an all-too-typical canard
slung at anyone who dares point out that the multi-culti emperor
has no clothes (or, at any rate, that the "diversity" gang seems
more interested in dishing out perks based on gender and race than
on promoting community based on equality).

Hunter (After
the Ball) Madsen told Miles that ethnic separatism has
been dressed up as multicultural diversity. Andrew Sullivan
lamented the movement's embrace of racial gerrymandering. And Rich
Tafel warned that gays lose when we appear to be the next liberal
group looking for "special rights" from taxpayers. "By making an
impression on traditionally conservative institutions," he said,
"traditionally liberal institutions will follow or join in. The
reverse is not true." But Miles was having none of it.

She claimed, in fact, that "Calling the national [gay] groups
'left' is inaccurate." Was this a stunning burst of myopia, or did
she merely lack the courage of her own left-wing convictions? At
any rate, she should ask NGLTF about its stand on NAFTA, the Gulf
War, and welfare for illegal aliens. Moreover, as columnist Paul
Varnell pointed out in the Windy City Times, the language
of the movement's ubiquitous "Fight the Right" campaigns seldom
seems to distinguish between religious-right extremists and the
roughly half of the country that considers itself politically
conservative.

Speaking of the left and gay groups, it's not surprising that
the very PC and quota-obsessed organizers of the Stonewall 25th
anniversary march in New York City, who employed "weighted voting"
and other schemes to "empower" women and people of color at the
expense of equality for all, wound up beset by mismanagement and
internal turmoil. When the commemoration ended, the committee was
over $300,000 in debt. Call it another victory for left-wing
(dis)organizational strategy, with its "appointment-by-quota,
only-leftists-need-apply," mentality, along with a fixation on
"process" and consensus-based decision-making (a demand for
uniformity that, in effect, stifles democratic debate).

Those who, like Miles, deny that the movement organizations are
skewed to the left often point to "moderate," nonpartisan groups
like the Human Rights Campaign Fund. But recently in the
Washington Blade Bob Roehr looked behind some of the
congressional defeats the movement has suffered. "None of HRCF's
registered lobbyists are Republican, none a conservative Democrat,"
Roehr wrote, even though "few issues are decided along straight
party lines." He added that, like other gay political groups,
HRCF's staffing patterns "are dominated by a rather small, strongly
left-of-center segment of the political spectrum. It is not the
broad, diverse base necessary to attract and cultivate a majority
of votes in Congress."

Although Miles had just argued it was "inaccurate" to label
national gay groups as part of the left, she wound up doing the
same thing herself. In fact, she ended her piece in Out
asserting that "the decision to situate gay and lesbian rights
within a progressive framework was a choice" made by the radicals
who took to the streets "while Marvin Liebman was living in the
closet and cheerleading for the Vietnam War."

But some of us see Stonewall as a beginning, not a permanent
movement model. In today's politics, it's the hard left that
repeatedly proves itself "reactionary" and resistant to
evolution.

Voice Chimes In
Just when I thought the left had vented enough spleen against
conservatives/libertarians (the left makes no distinction) to leave
it satiated for awhile, the Village Voice appeared with a
special Stonewall 25 section picking up the battle cry. Richard
Goldstein's "The Coming Crisis of Gay Rights" was heartfelt but
predicable. The gay political agenda is now in jeopardy, it seems,
because not all gays are loyally adhering to the party line.

Goldstein took aim (surprise, surprise) at Sullivan, Bawer,
Liebman, and (finally, recognition!) yours truly. We were labeled
"gayocons" - and treated as if we advocated the same positions on
all matters sexual and political, with no significant variances
among us.

Goldstein claimed "the biggest blunder of gay conservatives" is
ignoring "the vital bond between queers and feminists" and that
"feminism is a movement that honors the individual." With what
ideological blinders does he view the world? Contemporary feminism
has become notorious for excommunicating from its ranks women who
deviate from approved ideology - just look at the hatchet job the
feminist leadership is carrying out against Christina Hoff Sommers,
whose book Who Stole Feminism? dares suggest that radical
feminism's anti-male bile is out of touch with ordinary women.

Goldstein added, for good measure, that the charge of "political
correctness" made against the left is indicative of "jargon
appropriated from male chauvinists" and that we "worship the sexual
hierarchy that affirms male power." I'd say we're simply trying to
be masculine-affirmative in the face of explicit feminist,
lesbigay savaging of the very concept of manhood.

"Nearly all members of this fraternity are white. And male. And
they act like it," Goldstein charged. In this, he echoed Miles, who
also played the "sexism" card (you didn't think she'd let that one
go by, did you?) when she called Bawer, Madsen and Liebman on the
carpet for having "written books that purport to speak for the
movement yet leave lesbians out entirely." But the reasons these
authors didn't dwell on lesbian issues is they know (sometimes from
painful experience) that any gay man who takes up lesbian-specific
concerns or describes lesbian activists' views is pounded for
presuming he can speak on behalf of women. So it's damned if you
do, damned if you don't.

Goldstein at least recognized we're not quite as bad as
our straight counterparts on the Right. Being gay ourselves, after
all, presents certain "contradictions" in our thought. Goldstein
even found himself complimenting me (I think): "New York
Native columnist Stephen H. Miller monitors 'male bashing'
by the women's movement, and regularly rails against the
'feminist-directed 'lesbigay' amalgamation' of gay life. He's every
bit as bitchy as Howard Stern when it comes to identity politics,
but every bit as fervent as Tony Kushner when it comes to gay
rights - and every bit as out."

Ah, sweet recognition. If I write a book, I'll be sure to use it
on the jacket.

Urvashi Vaid's Amerika
Last but by no means least, the gay left's escalating intolerance
for ideological diversity got a boost from an old hand at this
game, former NGLTF executive director Urvashi Vaid, who is writing
a book from Anchor/Doubleday titled Virtual Equality: The Mainstreaming of Gay and Lesbian
Liberation (hint: she's against it). As part of the
build-up, a Vaid call to arms, "The Status Quo of the Status
Queer," ran in the June issue of Gay Community News. The
essence of her thesis: Gays and lesbians who seek to join the
mainstream are sell-outs to the radical cause.

Vaid complained that recent developments on the cultural front -
Newsweek's lesbian chic cover story, the Ikea ad featuring
a gay male couple, Tom Hanks's praise for two gay teachers while
accepting his Philadelphia Oscar - left her "feeling very
uneasy." Lamented Vaid: "As more of us move into a space where we
can be personally gay or lesbian...we risk being appeased."

Rather than aspiring to join the mainstream, Vaid wants lesbians
and gays to radicalize American society by "building a powerful,
grassroots, political movement rooted in notions of Liberation and
not merely Rights."

Vaid never really said what she means by "Liberation," but
judging from her speeches it's not hard to figure out. In a 1991
tour de force, she wailed that the world "has taken off its ugly
white hood to show its sexist, racist, anti-gay and
capitalist face" (emphasis added).

This, by the way, brings to mind a Newsday op-ed piece
by Raan Medley, a lawyer and former member of ACT BLACK (the
African-American caucus of ACT UP), who called the Ikea ad "the
culmination of 25 years of...de facto segregation by one of the
nation's best organized, most politically cohesive and, indeed,
narcissistic minorities" - a sentiment shared by the religious
right, no doubt.

Unreconstructed hard leftists like Vaid aren't looking to
regenerate community through volunteerism; state-engineered
restructuring of personal relationships is more in line with her
thinking. Alas, she runs into that old leftist conundrum: the
masses aren't interested in the kind of world she and her cohorts
know is in their best interest.

Vaid clearly doesn't like the fact that consumers in a free
market can chose to support what they like - she's upset that
"Lifestyle magazines keep appearing (Out, 10
Percent) while movement driven political papers like
OutLook and Gay Community News falter." She
pined: "The gay and lesbian liberation movement has turned into a
gay and lesbian marketing movement" and complains that "a political
movement is not what is being sold."

And there's more. "Has anyone read Christopher Street
lately?" she asked. "The anxiety and misogyny of the male writers
read as it if is the 1970s." Now Christopher Street is
about the only major gay publication that will publish serious work
on men's issues - the rest of the gay magazine world having gone
"lesbigay."

Maybe she had in mind pieces I've written for CS on topics
ranging from the feminist/"queer" demonizing of gay masculinity and
men's community to the misuse of race and gender quotas within gay
organizations (gay white men, as noted above, being privileged
members of the patriarchy from whom power must be wrested). Why is
it that many radical lesbian feminists who hold "women's culture"
sacred go ballistic at the thought "men's culture" might also be
valuable and unique?

Vaid needn't agree with me, but that's not her point. Despite
the gay left's dominance of lesbian and gay media (including many
of the "lifestyle" magazines Vaid dismisses - like Out -
and certainly the Advocate and most gay papers, as well as
the Gay Cable Network), Vaid doesn't seem to think the community
should abide any forum for views that aren't politically
correct.

And speaking of PC, Vaid also doesn't like the term one whit,
seeing it as part of the "backlash against race and gender equality
- the same enemy behind the white hood." Vaid told Sara Miles in
Out, "I'm so tired of hearing people throw around
'politically correct' as a term to shut everyone up. It's exactly
like saying 'nigger-lover." Now, just who in the movement is trying
to shut up whom by making incendiary comparisons?

To those of us who have knocked our heads against the PC inanity
that riddles the movement - running afoul of the language police,
enduring castigation for the collective guilt of white maledom, or
being driven from leadership positions in gay organizations for
questioning the wisdom of community building based on the rigid
application of racial and gender quotas - Vaid's hyperbole rings
exceedingly hollow.

At the conclusion of her GCN manifesto, Vaid called for
"a full-scale frontal assault" against "the coming of a racist,
sexist gay and lesbian Right." This is pure Stalinism - silencing
anyone who opposes the hard left's dominance of the gay movement by
labeling us racist and sexist. And it's typical Vaid.

I remember that when Vaid resigned from NGLTF a few years back,
an article by gay journalist Rex Wockner, quoting both her fans and
critics, appeared in Outweek and other gay papers. Vaid's
supporters were outraged, writing letters to the editor that said
the criticism of Vaid - a lesbian of color - was motivated by
sexism and racism. Her defenders also pointed to a fawning
assessment of Vaid's tenure published in another gay publication,
holding it up as a model for how her departure should have been
covered by everyone.

The problem is not that Vaid is a dogmatic lefty, but that her
views now represent "mainstream" (sorry, Urvashi) lesbian and gay
political thought. She is cheered when she arrives at lesbian/gay
gatherings. And her lover, comedian Kate Clinton (who organized a
fundraiser for Lorena Bobbitt - no joke) gives her added cache.

Bruce Bawer told me he views the recent flurry of attacks on gay
centrists/conservatives as a sign that hard-left gay activists are
running scared, fearing loss of their foot soldiers as lesbian and
gay folks cease to defined themselves solely as marginalized
outcasts.

But these remain delicate times for the gay community; the same
advances into the mainstream that unnerve gay leftists have
provoked fierce new attacks by the radical right. And to the
homophobes, all gays and lesbians are part of an undifferentiated
bloc intent on subverting the bourgeois norms that underlie social
order - especially when we (horrors) demand the right to marry the
person we love or serve our country in the armed forces (both of
which, somehow, get lumped in with "special rights").

This means that gays who eschew the entrenched, leftover left
must fight against both radical gay lunacies and homophobic
right-wing bigotries - an ongoing battle on two fronts, with no
rest for the weary.

Welcome

IGF CultureWatch is a blog that originated with the Independent Gay Forum, a group of writers and activists who focused on advancing LGBT legal equality and social inclusion beyond ideological rigidity and leftwing orthodoxy. more